Feature request: allow data from linked telegram chat channels to be collected

[muneerahp]

Telegram chats have linked "discussion" channels, where users can respond to messages in the main channel. Occasionally, these are also public, and if so, can also be found by the API. It would be useful to allow users to also automatically collect data from these chat channels if they're found.

A note on this and future feature requests: we're (https://github.com/GateNLP) putting in some additions to the telegram data collector on our end. Thought it might be worth checking if there's scope for them to be added to the original/main instance.

If any issues with this/they don't really fit with what you have in mind for your instance, all fine, we'll continue to maintain them on our own fork instead!

Linked pull request: https://github.com/digitalmethodsinitiative/4cat/pull/322

[stijn-uva]

Hi @muneerahp , thanks for this. I can certainly see how this is a useful feature, but I'll have to think a bit about whether we want to merge it into 4CAT proper. The workflow for most (all?) data sources is pretty much you see what you get - you ask for a specific group/query/thread and those are captured. This would basically build snowballing the initial query into the data source itself which changes things up a bit and might be confusing to users.

The holidays are almost starting so I think we'll come back to this in the new year when we've had a chance to discuss this.

[bkotras13]

Hello! Is there any update on this matter? My research would also benefit greatly from this feature. Thanks! Baptiste